Devils and Dust (35 page)

His short laugh sent jagged shards of pain through the muscles of his chest and back. It felt fitting. “Well,” he said, “the last thing I want to do is make this any harder on
you
.”

She opened her eyes. “I almost didn’t come. I even wrote a letter. I knew you’d be angry. I knew you’d be bitter. I knew you’d say things that hurt, because I know how much this hurts you, and I didn’t think I could stand it.”

He picked a towel off the bed beside him and wiped the sweat from his brow. “So why did you come?”

“Because you deserve better than to hear it from someone else. You deserve more than a letter. That would make me a coward. I owe you at least the respect of saying what I have to say to your face.”

He tossed the towel on the bed. “What’s to say? I mean, I could have sworn you said you loved me. And I know I said it to you. And now, I guess…what? You changed your mind?”

She walked over and leaned on the back of the wooden chair that sat by the bed. “No,” she said. “No, I didn’t change my mind about loving you. I love you and I always will. But I made a promise. I made a promise to a good man. And he needs me.”

“I need you.” The words came out in a hoarse whisper before he could stop them.

“Maybe. But you need more than that. You need to run after people and kick doors in and take down the bad guys. You need to put yourself in the line of fire, like you did at that place in South Carolina. It’s in your blood. You don’t feel alive unless you’re doing that. And I can’t live like that, Jack. When they told me you’d been shot, they didn’t expect you to make it. And when I heard that, I died inside. Not a little. Everything inside me turned to ashes.”

“Does Oscar know that?” Keller said.

“No. He’s still detained. We see each other once a week and we talk through the glass. He knows how I feel about you. But he knows I love him, too. In a different way, but I love him. He says we can learn to be happy together. We can settle down, live a quiet life, raise his sons.”

“A quiet life,” Keller said, in the voice of someone putting a name to a paradise he’d never see.

“Yes. A quiet life.” She shook her head. “Jack, I can’t go through this again. And if I stay with you, if I let myself go and love you the way you deserve, I will. Maybe not soon, but sometime, you’ll find something else to chase, some bad guy that needs taking down and…” she gestured at the bed. “It’ll be this all over again. I can’t take it, Jack. I’m tough, I know I am, I’ve had to be, but I just…can’t.” She bowed her head. He tried to stand, to go to her, but his legs wouldn’t hold him up. She saw him almost go down and rushed to him. He put his arms around her and held onto her like a drowning man. Gently, she lowered him back to a sitting position on the bed.

He looked up and saw her eyes were wet with tears.
I can change
, he wanted to say, but he knew it was a lie. He didn’t want to lie to her. Not here, at the end.

There was a knock on the door. A thin, red-haired nurse in multicolored scrubs bustled in. She saw Keller sitting on the edge of the bed and beamed. “You’re sitting up,” she said. “Good.” Then she took a closer look at his face and her smile slipped a couple of notches.

“You weren’t tryin’ to
stand
up, were you?”

“Yeah,” Angela said, before he could answer. “He was. Sorry. My fault.”

“Excuse me, hon,” the nurse said, gently nudging Angela out of the way with her hip. “Lie back,” she ordered. Keller complied, never taking his eyes off Angela. The nurse busied herself taking his vital signs.

“I’ll let you get to work,” Angela said to her, stepping away from the bed.

“Okay,” the nurse said absently, not noticing the tears in Angela’s eyes. “You have a good day, now.”

“Are you coming back?” Keller said.

Angela shook her head. “Plane leaves tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Keller said, a lump welling up in his throat. “Stay safe.”

“You, too.” She hesitated for a moment. “Good-bye, Jack.” She walked out, slowly, leaning on the cane.

“BP’s up a bit,” the nurse said, a line appearing between her eyes. “How’s the pain?”

“Pretty bad,” Keller said.

“You want something for it?”

He shook his head. “It won’t help.”

“It’s up to you,” she said. “Only thing that’ll really make it better is time.”

“Yeah,” said Keller. “That’s what I hear.”

A
UGUSTE
M
ANDUJANO
awoke after midnight. He didn’t know what had awakened him, but his hand went instinctively to the .357 Magnum revolver he kept under the pillow next to him. As his hand closed around the familiar grip, he came awake enough to recognize the scent that filled the room. It was a scent he knew well, the scent of raw meat. Meat and blood. There was something in the bed with him, a large lumped shape. When he moved, the sheets were wet and sticky.

He heard something moving in the hallway and sat up, pointing the pistol at the open door. Where the hell were his guards?

A shadow filled the doorway. The shape didn’t register at first. It was the wrong height and width to be a human. Another smell assailed his nostrils, a scent that awakened a primal fear deep in the oldest part of the brain—the scent of big cat. He realized then what the lump in his bed was—a large, bloody haunch of raw meat.

The shadow drew nearer, raised a great shaggy head, and as the intruder stepped into a shaft of moonlight coming through the window, Auguste Mandujano looked into the golden eyes of a five-hundred pound African lion.

His breath caught in his throat and he froze. Then he screamed in terror, a high, shrill scream like a woman’s. His scream was answered with a deep guttural roar from the lion. Mandujano pulled the trigger on the pistol, again and again.

The hammer clicked on one empty chamber after another as the lion roared again and leaped.

O
UTSIDE IN
the darkness, in the shadow of the garden wall, stood two men, dressed in black combat fatigues without insignia. Their eyes were obscured by the night vision goggles they wore. One of them, a short, muscular black man with a shaved head who had recently been part of Mandujano’s mercenary security detail, cocked his head to listen as the screams from within the house suddenly ceased.

“Bad kitty,” he said.

“Actually,” the other man said, “I feel kind of bad for the poor beast.” The other man was taller, and slender. Until recently he’d been working as a “cultural attaché” at the U.S. Consulate, where everyone had known him as Mr. Huston. He’d shaved off his beard and moustache. “He’ll probably be killed when they discover what he’s done. But he’s only following his programming. Once I saturated Mandujano’s sheets with lion pheromones, and you placed that raw meat in the bed, he couldn’t help himself.”

“That cat was either going to fight Mandujano or fuck him, huh?” the shorter man laughed. “I guess he got the lesser of the two evils.”

A voice crackled in their earpieces, a country twang that belonged to the man who’d recently been wearing the uniform of a Marine medic. “You boys about ready to haul ass?” The two men by the gate acknowledged. “Awright then. Pickup in thirty seconds. Be there or be square.”

The two men slipped silently out of the gate, but not before the taller man bent down and placed their calling card in the walkway.

It was a children’s toy, a small iron horse.

T
HE DOOR
to the bar swung open. “Hey, hon,” the bartender said as she looked up from where she’d been reading a newspaper behind the bar. “First customer of the…” the smile on her face died as she saw who it was. “Well,” she said without warmth. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Keller walked over and took a stool. He moved slowly, lowering himself onto the stool as if he were afraid it would grow spikes. Jules’s eyes widened as she saw how thin and drawn he looked.

“Jesus,” she said, “What the hell happened to you?” Then her face closed up again as she remembered she was angry at him.

“Long story,” Keller said.

“Well, I ain’t in the mood for any long stories,” she said. “What do you want?”

“A beer,” Keller said. “And I was wondering if there were any job openings.”

Her jaw tightened. “You expect to just walk back in here, after walkin’ out on me, and leavin’ me high and goddamn dry, and just have everything be the way it was?”

“No,” Keller said. “I’m not expecting anything. I just thought I’d ask.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said. She pulled a Shiner Bock out of the cooler, popped the top, and set it in front of him.

“Okay,” Keller said. “And by the way, I’m sorry.”

“Sorriest thing I’ve seen in a while,” she said. She looked him up and down. “You look like forty miles o’ bad road.”

Keller didn’t answer. She started rubbing down the already immaculate bar top, not looking at Keller. He sat and drank his beer, slowly.

“Okay,” she said finally. “It’s only ‘cause I can’t find anyone else to do the job worth a damn, but you can have it back.”

“Thanks.”

“But don’t think you’re gettin’ back in my bed again. I know better this time.”

“All right.”

“I never shoulda slept with the help, anyway. And that’s all you are from now on. The help. You get it?”

“Okay,” he said.

Her composure slipped a little. “You hurt me, Jack Keller.”

“I know,” he said. “Again, I’m sorry.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “You sure you’re up for the job? You don’t hardly look like you can lift yourself out of bed.”

“I’m getting better,” he said. “Every day. It’s just going to take some time.”

She laughed. “Well, time’s somethin’ we got plenty of around here.”

First and foremost, many thanks to my editor, Jason Pinter, whose response to my e-mail query “you interested in re-issuing the first three Jack Keller novels?” was “You want to write a fourth one?” You are holding the answer to that question in your hands. I hope you enjoyed it.

Second: Since 1996, I’ve written a weekly column for my local newspaper, the Southern Pines
Pilot
. The fact that I write a very liberal column in a very conservative area lands me on some, shall we say, interesting e-mail lists. One of my most persistent correspondents is a fellow who always signs off with the words “RACE SURVIVAL DEMANDS RACISM.” He and many of the sites he sends me links to are the inspiration for the Church of Elohim. The Church itself is fictional, but those ideas and the people who espouse them actually exist. I only wish they were totally made up.